Tom McCarthy - Remainder

I moved up the staircase, past the boring couple’s flat, on up to where the liver lady lived. Her door was the wrong size, like all the doors, but the spot beside it where she’d place her rubbish bag for the concierge to pick up as I went by: that was just right-minus the pattern, of course. I listened at her door as well and heard a television playing. I walked around the spot she’d place her bag on, looking at it from different angles. I saw where I’d come down the staircase just as her door was opening. Standing there now, I could picture her in greater detail: her wiry hair wrapped in a shawl, the posture of her back as she bent down, the way the fingers of her left hand sat across her lower back and hip. The tingling started up again.

It just remained for me to walk up to my floor. I did this and stood outside my own flat. I listened at the door: no sound. The occupants were probably out at work. I tried to X-ray through the door-not to see what was actually inside but to project what would be: the open-plan kitchen with its Sixties fridge and hanging plants, the wooden floors; off to the right the bathroom with its crack, the pink-grey plaster round it, grooved and wrinkled, the blue and yellow daubs of paint. Then the bit of wall without a mirror where David Simpson’s mirror had been, the bathtub with its larger, older taps, the window that the scent of frying liver wafted in through.

I stood there, projecting all this in. The tingling became very intense. I stood completely still: I didn’t want to move, and I’m not sure I could have even if I had wanted to. The tingling crept from the top of my legs to my shoulders and right up into my neck. I stood there for a very long time, feeling intense and serene, tingling. It felt very good.

What snapped me out of it eventually was a door closing with a bang on a lower floor. I could hear someone coming out and walking down the staircase. I moved on to the end of my landing; there was a floor above it, with two normal doors and then a smaller, padlocked one. Cat access huts as well, perhaps, I reasoned. Seven or so feet to my door’s right there was a window: I leant against it and, forehead on pane, looked out across the courtyard. From here I could see that the facing roof was flat, not staggered. It wasn’t red either. There were three cat access sheds on it in all, ten or so feet apart. I pictured the cats lounging: two or three of them at any given time, spread out across the roofs I’d have made staggered-lounging, languorous and black against their red.

I’d seen all I needed to see. I spun off from the window and walked straight down to the lobby without pausing. I walked straight across this, too, and out into the street. I found a phone and called Naz.

“Any luck?” he asked.

“I’ve found it, yes,” I told him.

“Excellent,” he answered. “Where?”

“In Brixton.”

“In Brixton?”

“Yes: Madlyn Mansions, Brixton. It’s behind a kind of sports track. Near a railway bridge.”

“I’ll find it on the map and call you back. Where are you now?”

“I’m on my way home,” I told him. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

I walked back to my flat. There was a message on my answering machine already, but when I played it, thinking it would be from Naz, it turned out to be from Greg. I lay down on the folded-away sofa bed and waited. Eventually Naz phoned.

“The building is privately owned,” he said, “and leased out to tenants. The owner is one Aydin Huseyin. He manages this and two other properties in London.”

“Right,” I said.

“Shall I enquire whether or not he’s interested in taking offers on this property?” Naz asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Buy it.”

We got it for three and a half million. A snip, apparently.

WE HIRED AN ARCHITECT. We hired an interior designer. We hired a landscape gardener for the courtyard. We hired contractors, who hired builders, electricians and plumbers. There were site managers and sub-site managers, delivery coordinators and coordination supervisors. We took on performers, props and wardrobe people, hair and make-up artists. We hired security guards. We fired the interior designer and hired another one. We hired people to liaise between Naz and the builders and managers and supervisors, and people to run errands for the liaisers so that they could liaise better.

Looking at it now, with the advantage-as they say-of hindsight, it strikes me that Naz could probably have devised a more efficient way of doing it. He could have chosen one place, one specific point to start from, and worked out from there in logical procession: chronologically, in a straight line, piece by piece by piece. The approach he took instead was piecemeal-everything springing up at once but leaving huge gaps in between and creating new problems of alignment and compatibility that in their turn required more supervising, more coordination.

“There’s a problem with the windows on the third floor,” Naz told me one day, several weeks into the works.

“I thought all the windows had been finished,” I said.

“Yes,” said Naz, “but now the windows in the main third-floor flat have to come out again so we can lift the piano in.”

Another time we realized we’d got the courtyard ready too soon: trucks would have to drive across it as they removed detritus from the building, ruining the landscaper’s creation.

“Why didn’t we think of that?” I asked Naz.

Naz smiled back. I started suspecting then that his decision to opt for the piecemeal approach was deliberate. As we were driven from one meeting to another-from the site itself, say, to our office in Covent Garden, or to our architect’s office in Vauxhall, or to the workshop of the metallurgist who was making our banisters, or from a Sotheby’s auction of Sixties’ Americana at which we’d been looking at fridges back to the site via Lambeth Town Hall (palms were greased-I’ll say no more)-each time we left the building or came near again we’d see trucks piled high with rubble, earth or ripped-out central-heating units pulling out from its compound and other trucks arriving with scaffolding or new earth or long strips of pine. There’d be small vans full of wiring, caterers’ vans, vans belonging to experts in fields I didn’t know existed: stone-relief consultants, acoustic technicians, non-ferrous-metal welders- London ’s premier in the art since 1932, this third outfit’s van announced proudly on its side.

“So what’s your position in the ferrous-metal league?” I asked them.

“We don’t do ferrous-metal welding,” they replied.

“And where did you rank before ’32?”

“I don’t know that. You’ll have to ask the boss.”

Then there’d be behemoths: giant cranes on wheels, crane lifts with crane-grab limbs, all skeletal and menacing and huge. We’d carry plaster on our clothes into a Mayfair piano salesroom, then carry the contrasting chimes and tinkles of four types of baby grand still humming in our ears on to a used furniture warehouse. We’d receive faxes on the machine we had in our car and stuff them into the back-seat glove compartment as the driver raced us to another meeting, then forget that we’d received them and have them re-faxed or go back to the same office or the same warehouse again-so the humming in our ears was constant, a cacophony of modems and drilling and arpeggios and perpetually ringing phones. The hum, the meetings, the arrivals and departures turned into a state of mind-one that enveloped us within the project, drove us forwards, onwards, back again. I’ve never felt so motivated in my life. Naz understood this, I think now, and cultivated a degree of chaos to keep everybody involved on their toes, fired up, motivated. A genius, if ever there was one.